Identify Your Main Plot (and your subplots)

To read my thoughts on all the How to Revise Your Novel lessons, click here.

Lesson 4 was interesting. I'd never seen this done before. We created a one-line summary of our book (which is highly recommended, btw). It has the protagonist, antagonist, conflict, twist, and setting.

Then we marked every scene that directly correlated with that sentence. Suprisingly, about half of my scenes fell into that category, maybe less.

So what about the rest of the scenes? We grouped them and labeled them as various subplots. Seeing so many scenes that enriched my plot, but weren't the lifeblood of the story made me feel a lot better about rearranging some things.

I noticed that I have a subplot that pushes into my main plot. Two "subplot characters" manage to take a lot of decision-making (and glory) from my heroine. That just can't happen. So there's going to need to be some serious revising of that subplot and those characters.

Thank goodness I caught that!